“It was an unseasonably warm December,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes, in the May issue of Wired, “and somewhere nearby a rising tide in the San Francisco Bay was lifting all kite-surfers, but Nick Edwards and Chris Monberg were crouched at opposite rented desks in a shared coworking space near the Caltrain station in SoMa wondering if, by the middle of February, they would still have a company.” The piece is about how the lives of young startup founders tend to be unglamorous exercises in survivalism, which contrast so markedly with the Golden State’s buoyant dreams. Profiling Edwards and Monberg, whose “personalization engine” company is called Boomtrain, he explores Silicon Valley’s constant threat of bust.

As a companion piece to Emily Nussbaum’s review of “Adventure Time”—which she calls “one of the most philosophically risky and, often, emotionally affecting shows on TV”—consider a recent feature about the makers of the hit cartoon, published by the Awl and written by Maria Bustillos. Like the show itself, which chronicles the magic-laced lives of a boy named Finn, his companion Jake (a shape-shifting dog), Princess Bubblegum, and the many other residents of the land of Ooo, Bustillos’s article bursts at the seams with characters, notably the show’s creator, Pendleton Ward. She quotes them at length, oral-history-style, making for a ramble about both humor and mortality.

Immortality—that of the Vikings, who are still lodged in our imaginations—is the topic of an article by Charles Emmerson, in the March/April issue of The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine. Emmerson tries to explain the world’s fixation with marauding Norsemen by consulting archaeologists, a tattoo artist, and a multicultural band of Viking reënactors, including “a British Muslim who fights not with one sword, but two, both curved in the eastern style.” In doing so, he pieces together a history of the enduring idea of Vikingness, which is “refashioned for each new generation according to its tastes.”

In the Washington Post, Eli Saslow sketches a portrait of Derric Winters, a Wyoming-based veteran of the war in Afghanistan who is struggling with what his doctor calls “the lonely process of overcoming combat,” and what he calls “the life of petty nonsense.” As Winters reintegrates himself into civilian society, what’s most striking is the sentiment captured in the article’s title, “Ugh. I Miss It,” the “it” being the camaraderie of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. Saslow writes, “What he missed—the only thing, really—were the soldiers: Dodd, Vance, Pinchock, Craighead and all the others, the men he fought for and fought with. Eighty or so men in total. That was his war.”